Eva's Retro 60s Flashbacks

The Dead Job Pool

Don’t be a soda jerk! Technological advances and societal
changes have rendered jobs that once loitered in the Sixties, obsolete. They’re either fast disappearing or—in the
dead pool, asleep with the fishes like Luca Brasi. Paying my last respects to the bygone soda jerk at
Marieville Pharmacy who jerked the soda fountain to make a vanilla ice cream soda I slurped and spooned while
spinning on one of the counter stools…

Jobs of Extinction:

Theice
man no longer cometh since the 1940s when most ice boxes were
replaced by electric refrigerators. As most of those in the business had a well-developed delivery system, some
averted a meltdown by keeping their cool and adapting to start home heating oil delivery companies which kept
Boomers warm.

Switchboard Operator: In the early days of phones, all calls had to be routed through switchboards. By the
time the 1980s dialed a complete rotary, switchboard operators were mainly used for long distance calling, and
taking down phone numbers if all circuits were busy. Demonstrating on the job performance --obnoxious circuit
breaker, Ernestine (Lily Tomlin, Laugh-In, late 60s). “One ringy dingy!” Nowadays—automation, automation,
automation!

Though we’ll always have “working girls,” they’ve come a long way
from the Sixties, baby! Thetypist
pool gives off a shimmery reflection from the dead pool, their
typewriters sinking to the bottom, be they manual or electric, their bells no longer ringing at the end of the
line. Leader of the cat pack, the executive secretary has left the building, no longer perched on her chauvinistic
boss’s desk swinging a shapely leg while taking dictation in shorthand, and transcribing it in a flawlessly typed
and spatially adjusted letter. Even those who dictated memos and letters using a Dictaphone for their gal
Friday to type what she heard, soon discarded all that red tape in favor of programs which transcribe
automatically. No more Xerox or copy machines either. Let’s see-- that leaves corporate head honchos hitting
on female subordinates striving to climb the corporate ladder by taking the “easy” way up. Of all the office
relics, the water cooler remains for gossip gatherings.

Earning a living as anelevator operator may have had its ups and
downs in an otherwise uplifting job of manually operating levers to move and land an elevator on the correct floor.
Even after buttons became the rigueur of the day, an operator was still required as those buttons didn’t allow for
extra stops. Now, we press our own buttons to rise above the ground floor. Endangered, but not yet
extinct, some monuments such as the Space Needle in Seattle, and the Empire State Building in Manhattan,
still employ EOs as an integral part of conducting tours or helping to direct crowd traffic.

Newspapers striving to stay afloat despite an increase in Web
readership, have nevertheless written their own obituaries. Used to be when reports came out of the teletype
machines from the news wire services, copy boys would take the information, sort it, and deliver. Then, when
a story was done, thecopy boys collected the article and took it to the editor. Now this gets done via document sharing
and e-mail. Newspapertypesetters who placed individual pieces
of type in printing presses to create newspaper pages are gone too, replaced by computers which automate the
process to do the layout more quickly.

Baby, you can drive my logs--a dangerous job to find yourself up a
creek without a paddle!Log drivers moved logs over long distances, guiding them down river, by standing on moving logs and
running from one to another. Some moved ahead of the logs to remove obstructions, while others freed stuck
logs from a jam. Agile and brawny, many a plaid Paul Bunyan lost his life in a crush. The use of trucks
on logging roads along with changes wrought by environmental legislation in the 1970s put an end to most log
rolling.

Esau Wood sawed wood. Esau Wood would saw wood. All the wood Esau
Wood saw, Esau Wood would saw. Wouldn’t you know, it had gotten so asawyer couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
Nowadays if you need lumber to build a fence, furniture, or tool shed, you can head to the nearest Home
Depot.

So many former jobs of the Sixties have become extinct. Many
more endangered occupations are well on their way to oblivion. Taps forcobblers losing their sole purpose. Time
is winding down forwatch repairers. Thecar mechanic in greasy Mayberry coveralls with an oil rag hanging out of his back pocket no longer
checks your oil or monkeys around with a wrench under the hood—service diagnosticians, they are now, reliant on
computers to pinpoint the problem. The bon-bon dipper will soon take a dive into the dead pool. Other
jobs of dubious distinction headed for termination: globe mounter, hogshead mat inspector, cement rougher, sponge
diver, dope dry house operator…

Out with the old, in with the
new—chief blogging officer. Stonyfield Farms is now hiring senior executives to write company blogs. The Royal
typewriter bell tolls for thee.